More than a Metaphor: Assessing the Historical Legacy of Resource Dependence and its Contemporary Promise as a Theory of Environmental Complexity

What is it about?

This paper offers a unique, citation analysis of Pfeffer and Salancik's (1978) External Control of Organizations, coupled with a broader literature review on resource dependence theory, to assess the impact of the theory on management scholarship. More importantly, we discuss how insights from resource dependence can be used to complement and extend the institutional logics perspective in the examination of environmental complexity.

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